“Preliminary results, yes.” Griffin nodded. “But when you add them all up and put them through the computer it comes out to a strong, nationwide support. It’s real enough. Significant to two sigmas, as I believe you people say. The people want an American to live on Mars.

“However,” he added, “that was before this latest fiasco. God knows what that would do if it got out. The administration doesn’t need a dead end, something to apologize for. It needs a success. I can’t tell you how much depends on it.”

The deputy director turned to Freeling. “Dr. Freeling?” he said.

Freeling stood up. “Willy Hartnett died of a stroke,” he said. “The full p.m. report is being typed up, but that’s what it comes to. There’s no evidence of systemic deterioration; at his age and condition, I wouldn’t have expected it. So it was trauma. Too much strain for the blood vessels in his brain to stand.” He gazed at his fingertips reflectively. “What comes next is conjecture,” he said, “but it’s the best I can do. I’m going to ask for consultations from Ripplinger at the Yale Medical School and Anford—”

“The hell you are,” snapped Griffin.

“I beg your pardon?” Freeling was caught off balance.

“No consultations. Not without full-scale security clearance first. This is urgent-top, Dr. Freeling.”

“Oh. Well — then I’ll have to take the responsibility myself. The cause of the trauma was too many inputs. He was overloaded. He couldn’t handle it.”

“I never heard of anything like that causing a stroke,” Griffin complained.

“It takes a good deal of stress. But it happens. And here we’re into new kinds of stress, Mr. Griffin. It’s like — well, here’s an analogy. If you had a child who was born with congenital cataracts, you would take him to a doctor, and the doctor would remove them. Only you would have to do it before he reached the age of puberty — before he stopped growing, internally as well as externally, you see. If you don’t do it by then, it’s better if you leave him blind. Kids who have such cataracts removed after the age of thirteen or fourteen have, as a matter of historical record, an interesting phenomenon in common. They commit suicide before they’re twenty.”

Torraway was trying to follow the conversation, but not quite succeeding. He was relieved when the deputy director intervened. “I don’t think I see what that has to do with Will Hartnett, Jon.”

“There, too, it is a matter of too many inputs. In the case of the kids after the cataract operation, what appears to happen is disorientation. They get new inputs that they have not grown a system to handle. If there is sight from birth onward, the visual cortex develops systems to handle, mediate and interpret it. If not, there are no developed systems, and it is too late to grow them.

“I think Willy’s trouble was that we gave him inputs that he had no mechanism available to handle. It was too late for him to grow one. All the incoming data swamped him; the strain broke a blood vessel. And,” he went on, “I think that will happen to Roger here, too, if we do the same thing with him.”

Griffin turned a brief, assessing look at Roger Torraway. Torraway cleared his throat, but said nothing. There did not seem to be anything for him to say. Griffin said, “What are you telling me, Freeling?”

The doctor shook his head. “Only what I’ve said. I tell you what’s wrong, it’s up to somebody else to tell you how to fix it. I don’t think you can fix it. I mean, not medically. You’ve got a brain — Willy’s or Roger’s. It has grown up as a radio receiver. Now you’re putting TV pictures into it. It doesn’t know how to deal with them.”

All this time Brad had been scribbling, looking up from time to time with an expression of interest. He looked down again at his note pad, wrote something, regarded it thoughtfully, wrote again, while the attention of everyone in the room turned to him.

At last the deputy director said, “Brad? It sounds as though the ball’s in your court.”

Brad looked up and smiled. “That’s what I’m working on,” he said.

“Do you agree with Dr. Freeling?”

“No question about it. He’s right. We can’t feed raw inputs into a nervous system that hasn’t got equipment to mediate and translate them. Those mechanisms don’t exist in the brain, not in anybody’s brain, unless we want to take a child at birth and rebuild him then so that the brain can develop what it needs.”

“Are you proposing that we wait for a new generation of astronauts?” Griffin demanded.

“No. I’m proposing we build mediating circuits into Roger. Not just sensory inputs. Filters, translators — ways of interpreting the inputs, the sight from different wavelengths of the spectrum, the kinesthetic sense from the new muscles — everything. Look,” he said, “let me go back a little bit. Do any of you know about McCulloch and Lettvin and the frog’s eye?” He glanced around the room. “Sure, Jonny, you do, and one or two of the others. I’d better review a little of it. The frog’s perceptual system — not just the eye, all of the vision parts of it — filters out what isn’t important. If a bug passes in front of the frog’s eye, the eye perceives it, the nerves transmit the information, the brain responds to it, and the frog eats the bug. If, say, a little leaf drops in front of the frog he doesn’t eat it. He doesn’t decide not to eat it. He doesn’t see it. The image forms in the eye, all right, but the information is dropped out before it reaches the brain. The brain never becomes aware of what the eye has seen, because it doesn’t need to. It simply is not relevant to a frog to know whether or not a leaf is in front of it.”

Roger was following the conversation with great interest, but somewhat less comprehension. “Wait a minute,” he said. “I’m more complicated — I mean, a man is a lot more complicated than a frog. How can you tell what I ‘need’ to see?”

“Survival things, Rog. We’ve got a lot of data from Willy. I think we can do it.”

“Thanks. I wish you were a little more sure.”

“Oh, I’m sure enough,” said Brad, grinning. “This didn’t catch me entirely by surprise.”

Torraway said, his throat half-closed and his voice thin, “You mean you let Willy go ahead and—”

“No, Roger! Come on. Willy was my friend, too. I thought there was enough of a safety factor to at least keep him alive. I was wrong, and I’m at least as sorry as you are, Roger. But we all knew there was a risk that the systems wouldn’t work right, that we’d have to do more.”

“That,” said Griffin heavily, “was not made very clear in your progress reports.” The deputy director started to speak but Griffin shook his head. “We’ll come to that another time. What are you saying now, Bradley? You’re going to filter out some of the information?”

“Not just filter it out. Mediate it. Translate it into a form Roger can handle.”

“What about Torraway’s point that a man is more complicated than a frog? Have you ever done this with human beings?”

Surprisingly, Brad grinned; he was ready for that one. “As a matter of fact, yes. About six years ago, before I came here — I was still a graduate student. We took four volunteers and we conditioned them to a Pavlovian response. We flashed a bright light in their eyes, and simultaneously rang an electric doorbell that pulsed at thirty beats a second. Well, of course, when you get a bright light in your eyes, your pupils contract. It isn’t under conscious control. You can’t fake it. It is a response to light, nothing else, just an evolutionary capacity to protect the eye from direct sunlight.

“That sort of response, involving the autonomic nervous system, is hard to condition into human beings. But we managed it. When it takes, it sets pretty firmly. After — I think it was after three hundred trials apiece, we had the response fixed. All you had to do was ring the bell, and the subjects’ pupils would shrink down to dots. You follow me so far?”